I installed a Samsung solid-state drive in our Windows 7 MC computer this afternoon, in the hope that this would help with the stuttering we often see when the HDD is struggling to keep up with playing a recording while recording a channel or two at the same time. Also, to give us additional storage space...

Soon after setting up the SSD and WMC to record on it, however, while watching live TV (MLB Network) I noticed that WMC would sometimes freeze, to the point where no commands were accepted and all we could do was wait for it to unfreeze itself. The display might or might not turn into large, disjointed blocks. I could get the mouse pointer to show, but the WMC controls would not appear and there was nothing to click the mouse on. Once things got sorted out after 30-90 seconds, the playback would rush forward to the current time.

Later in the evening, after this happened several times while we were trying to watch a recording of "Jeopardy," my wife asked me to revert the recording drive to one of the existing HDDs that's running low on space. No problem, I thought -- just this afternoon I had changed it from the G: drive to the new SSD, labeled M:. But tonight when I went to Save the new setting back to the G: drive, WMC gave me the scary notice in this topic's title:

This change will result in the immediate deletion of some of your recordings.

Nothing was being recorded at the time.

Several questions:

What could be causing this message?

Why would it happen tonight but not this afternoon?

What can I do about it?

If I did proceed with changing the recording drive back to G:, will any recordings in fact be lost, and from which drive -- the old one with tons of stuff on it, or the new one with just a couple of shows?

I am also curious to know if anybody else has experienced this kind of WMC freezing after setting up an SSD for recording on WMC. Wondering if maybe the graphics card can't keep up with the SSD, or what else might be the problem there.

***PLEASE NOTE: The SSD is being used for WMC recording and storage ONLY, not as the OS drive.

Whatever settings you have on WMC--total space to be used, etc.--it will now apply those to the old drive when you switch back to it, and it will indeed delete the oldest recordings.

Did you change any of those WMC preferences when you switched to the SSD? Is the SSD smaller than the drive WMC was recording to?

There's no reason a properly working computer with a spinning hard drive can't record 6 shows at once and still play back recordings to the TV plus extenders. A hard drive going bad would exhibit what you saw, but that would mean simply replacing it with another spinner and all would be well.

That the playback "rushed forward" tells me this has something to do with software running on that PC. Anti virus?

It seems to me I've seen this behavior before myself, but I can't pin it down.

Thank you. The only WMC setting I changed myself when switching the recording location from the old drive to the new drive, was that WMC was offering to use 800GB from the 1TB SSD for recording, and I changed that to 850GB. (Just to be clear, both drives are now in operation, it wasn't a case of taking the old one out to put the new one in.)

However, I did notice that the Live TV Buffer that WMC set for the SSD is bigger than the buffer that it had set for the HDD. Could this be the source of the scary message?

Other info that you asked for: While the SSD drive is 1TB (actually 931GB), the older spinning drive that's running out of room is 3TB.

And regarding the software on that PC, other than the usual stuff that comes with Windows 7 and stuff that HP puts in, the only software on it is Norton Internet Security. It's been there from the beginning but this "freezing then rushing forward" playback started when the SSD went into service. Coincidence?

Still hoping to get ideas on what the root of the problem could be, and how to solve it.

In the meantime, I've taken some of the usual steps when strange things start happening to a PC: rebooting, Disk Cleanup, sfc /scannow, CCleaner. But nothing's helped.

One (maybe) interesting thing is that last night we were talking about an old episode of the weener van Dyke Show, for which we have all the episodes on an old (and full) external HDD. Wife found it and we watched it -- and there were no issues at all with the playback. This suggests that the problem could have something to do with the brand-new, blazing-fast, high-tech SSD.

EDIT: OMG I can't believe that an automated bulletin-board censor mangled the title of that classic TV show. "weener van Dyke" Oh, and the title reads just fine in the editing window...

I've had an issue where the video will freeze but the audio will continue as normal, then after a bit, the video will move in a fast-forward type manner to catch up with the audio and then it is normal again. This is on a spinning hard drive, not an SSD.

I'm not 100% sure, but I am guessing it is happening due to the boot (system) drive going bad (not the drive that holds the videos!). I've known that the system drive has been going bad for a long time now, and after a while I started seeing this symptom. The other symptom that I've been seeing for a while now is that the disk activity light will go solid red for a long interval (like 30 seconds) and during this time it appears that disk read activity is limited or stopped in some way (although writing does not seem to be affected).

It is only recently that I've tried to make a system image of the drive and it failed. I've not been able to get a SMART report for this drive in a long time (it just reports that there is no SMART on the drive, when there used to be when I first got it), but I was always able to make an image backup without a problem (or at least it never failed).

What's interesting is that it has never affected recordings, just this symptom when playing back the recordings or reading from the drive. The recordings themselves (up to now at least) have been fine, so I''ve been living with it. But now that I am unable to make an image of the drive, I am planning on replacing it. Again, the drive that is being used to record to and play back from is NOT the drive that is failing, it is the boot/system drive that is failing and it seems to in some way be affected the ability to read from the good drive (although writing seems to be fine).

I have no idea if this is the problem you are having, but one way to test it is to boot off of a different drive then the one you have been and see if the problem persists.

I'm hoping that a drive swap will not cause the DRM to "break" (make it think it is a different system). You are allowed to make a certain amount of changes to your system before Playready will decide that it is too much and declare that it is not the same system.

If the swap causes that to happen, then I will try adding the new drive but leaving the old (bad) drive in the system as well, that may be enough for it to still think it is the same system (as long as the bad drive doesn't totally die).

Note that transferring the DRM recordings themselves is not an issue, it's making sure that the hardware in your system doesn't change so much that Playready thinks it is a different system, otherwise it will not play back old DRM recordings.

Note that the only signs I had that the drive was bad were the solid red disk activity light, the SMART not being detected and the video freezing while the solid red light was on. Other tests of the drive were OK (at least until recently).

Good luck with the switch if you eventually need to make it. I'd hate to have to lose movies and series from pay channels, but what can we do.

I've been checking the OS drive and so far things look OK over here. But now there's a new twist. Because the SSD was moving like molasses, I changed the WMC Recording Location to the C: drive pending a decision on whether to keep or replace the SSD. Closed WMC and rebooted, then relaunched WMC to verify that the change held.

But... now we can't get live TV. Any channel we enter, it simply says "Unable to view channel." I can tune a channel just fine in the Ceton Diagnostics, but not in WMC. Soon after relaunching WMC there was something about if I wanted to set up the CableCARD now, which I usually ignore when it comes up. But after seeing that we couldn't tune to any channels, I went back to CableCARD Setup and got this screen:

Huh? Never saw anything like this before. It's the same CableCARD we've been using since installing FiOS last year, why would it all of a sudden be claiming that we need a second CableCARD to watch premium channels? It's a 4-tuner Ceton, do I really need 4 CableCARDS now ("one for each of your digital tuners")???

Don't know if this could be related to the topic thread or if it's just a bad coincidence, but here we are, way worse off than before I tried to make things better by installing that SSD.

Update: I ended up doing a System Restore to before the SSD went in. Amazingly, the tuners are working again (knock on wood) and we are getting live TV.

The SSD is still connected inside the PC but the Recording Location is back to where it was before. We'll see if tonight's scheduled recordings actually tape. Haven't decided yet what to do about that SSD.

EDIT: Just saw your updated post after posing this (was in the middle of responding when I got pulled away for a hour) so I guess this info won't help now that you did a restore, but I leave it here for posterity

I've never seen that message. If you have an M-Card CableCard (which you should) then one CableCard is enough for up to 6 tuners. This seems to be a message you would get if you have one of the old S-Card CableCard tuners (where you needed one card per tuner).

Perhaps your Ceton driver got corrupted somehow? I would think that it is the driver/tuner hardware that would report information about the Ceton device.

I found this old document that describes a little about the old S-Card CableCard tuners and WMC (from the Vista days) and how you MUST have one CableCard per tuner or else neither tuner will work properly (which seems to be what that error message is indicating, since there is no option to "continue with only one tuner").

Maybe something with the DCA (Digital Cable Advisor) settings?

I am really just throwing out things that pop in my head, I really don't know what to do.

Maybe just reboot (if you have not done that already)?

I wouldn't make any changes to your system without making sure you have a image backup of your system drive to go back to in case things get even worse.

Thank you, that is all good info/advice and it deserves to stay up for the next person who runs into a similar problem.

After the System Restore, everything's still working great. I can't imagine what the simple act of changing the recording location could possibly have done to mess things up so royally, affecting even WMC's ability to properly identify the CableCARD, but it's a big relief that System Restore managed to undo the damage.

I'm not sure this will help as I've never had a problem setting it either way, but make sure the SSD is set up for AHCI (not IDE) operation in the bios.

Also, make sure the SSD has properly aligned partitions. Just google SSD alignment if you need assistance.

Your problem seems to be a bit more severe than what either of these would cause though.

Thank you, the PC was set to AHCI in the BIOS. But I did read somewhere that AMD drivers for SSD's were not nearly as good as Intel's, at least not at first. And this PC is from 2011. I'll look into the SSD partition alignment issue, had never heard of that.

But as you said we do seem to be having more serious problems. Tonight, even though the system was restored to before the SSD went in and we're using a HDD to record on, we had trouble recording programs again. Only one channel at a time would tape, even though we have 4 tuners (Ceton InfiniTV 4 PCIe) and Ceton Diagnostics can get a channel on any of them. WMC was throwing that "Unable to view channel" message again whenever I tried to tune to any channel other than the one being recorded.

Also, for a few minutes, we couldn't even watch previously recorded shows. Click on the item and the audio would start, but with no video, and then even the audio would cease after 4-5 seconds even though the progress bar (the one that tells you where you are in the recording) kept advancing normally.

All very odd, and frustrating. I can't tell if it's WMC acting up, or Windows generally, or the PC itself, or the CableCARD, or the Ceton tuner, or maybe some combination of these. A lot of variables to try to eliminate. Seriously considering giving up on WMC for a Verizon DVR, life is too short.

UPDATE: While awaiting the arrival of the new CableCARD from Verizon and the "used, like new" Ceton tuner purchased via Amazon, I kept working on the problem PC. As part of the troubleshooting, I'd started to pull out the old CableCARD -- when all of a sudden the video signal went out.

Thinking it might have something to do with the CableCARD, I pushed it back in, but the video didn't come back. So I rebooted... and still the signal wouldn't come back. Changed HDMI ports on the TV, tried a different HDMI cable -- nothing. In case it was the TV set itself, I plugged in the new PC that's slated to replace the current one for WMC TV viewing, and that worked, so it wasn't the TV.

I had a spare graphics card, so when I got a chance this afternoon, I switched out the old GPU for the spare one (an Nvidia GT 730). Wouldn't you know it, we had a video signal again. After updating the driver, I tried live TV on WMC, fingers crossed: success! And not only that, but all four tuners are (currently) working again!!

Will keep an eye on the situation of course, but the whole recent problem, including the tuner issue, seems to have been due to a dying graphics card!?! Does that jibe with your experience??

If this keeps working, I'll use the new CableCARD and Ceton tuner to save on the monthly fees for a Verizon set-top box. As for the Samsung SSD, while the PC case was open I took that out and will keep it in reserve for an Intel-based PC.

I would be worried to hit any SSD with so much reading and writing...those things will burn up with the typical 5GB per hour per show. I use a Ceton 6 tuner card, and in testing with 6 recordings active, I was able to playback from my WD 5400rpm Red just fine. The only time I get any lag from playing back or recording, is when recordings or playback start from a cold state..cold state meaning HHD spun down and stopped. I have my HHD's set to spin down and cut off after 10 minutes...enought time to fix a snack or use the bathroom. The spin up time is usually long enough to throw a few cannot record show error boxes before the Ceton can start laying down video files. I upgraded to twin WD Red 7200rmp drives, one to record on, the other is set to duplicate the Recorded TV folder every night as a backup in the event the primary drive fails.